Cheating at Solitaire (9 page)

“Yes,” Gregor said. “But.”

“She is not the sort of woman who thrives on compromise, is she, Krekor? It's really all we need here, a little compromise. A little pro forma. I do not pretend that the questions involved are not serious. They're very serious. But in this case, for the purposes of a wedding, maybe not so much. I don't understand why I can't make her see that.”

“Don't look at me,” Gregor said. “I can't make her see anything. I've been trying for years.”

“It is just a matter of pro forma,” Tibor said again. “It is a matter of satisfying the forms when you cannot satisfy the substance. If we don't do that, I will have a problem with the archdiocese. I might be able to get away with it if the whole thing could be done in privacy, but you know there will be no privacy. You are not a private person. She is not a private person.”

“Also, she can't sit back and shut up to save her life,” Donna said.

The two of them turned around and looked at her, a little surprised to find that she was still there. Donna Moradanyan Donahue was as tall and fair as Bennis should have been, as if the two of them had been switched at birth, except that Donna was fifteen years younger. Having been released from the dietary strictures of pregnancy, she seemed to be mainlining caffeine in the form of thick Armenian coffee, right through the middle of the day. She drained the cup she had now and pushed it away from her, beginning to gather up her things.

“Look,” she said, “this is just not going to work. If you
sit around here for the next five months doing nothing but worrying at all this stuff, there isn't going to be any wedding, and then the women on this street are going to form a posse and kill both of you. You and Bennis, I mean, not you, Father. Never mind. Gregor, just make some sense, will you please? Go find yourself some work to do. Get yourself off the street for a while. Bennis has a book tour in February and early March—you can come back then. Then Russ and I can put her up for April and the first part of May, and—”

“You do realize how ridiculous it is,” Gregor said. “Ben-nis going to stay with you as if we hadn't been living together for years.”

“Just get out of here,” Donna said. “You're twitchier than she is, and she's twitchy enough for an overpopulated séance. There's got to be some police force in the country that has a murder they don't know what to do with. Maybe the Bureau has a convention or something that you could go to.”

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation does not hold conventions.”

“whatever. Get out of here. Do something sensible. Let us take care of all the arrangements.”

“With you taking care of the arrangements, this is going to resemble a story out of the
Arabian Nights
.”

Donna had all her stuff in her bag, sort of. She'd left the top unzippered and things that looked like black ribbons spilling out. She slung it over her shoulder and reached for her coat on the coatrack next to the booth. “Do something with yourself,” she said. And then she stomped her way out of the plate glass front door and onto the street.

Everybody seemed to be stomping today. Gregor thought that that must mean something, but he wasn't sure what. Ti-bor was sitting quietly over an empty plate that had once had big piles of lamb casserole on it, and the other diners, almost all of them people Gregor knew, were paying no attention to him. Everybody was stomping, and he was stomping too, and the reason was nowhere near as simple as “getting cold feet” about the wedding or being put off because, as things
stood now, it looked as if they wouldn't be able to hold it in church.

“You know,” he said to Tibor, “I'm really not getting cold feet about the wedding. Sometimes I worry that Bennis might be, but I'm not.”

“I didn't think you were,” Tibor said.

“I've wanted this wedding since the year I met her,” Gregor said. “I didn't even realize it, in the beginning. She was, I don't know, not the sort of person I thought that sort of thing about, if there was any sort of person I thought that sort of thing about with Elizabeth dead just a year. But I did think it, unconsciously, if that makes sense.”

“Of course it makes sense.”

“I just wish it wasn't such an enormous event. There's something about the fuss that's making me crazy. I tell myself I'm worried that it's making her crazy, and that it's going to make her back off, but I know that's not the truth. She thrives on this stuff. I had no idea she could get this involved in planning something.”

“Most women like to plan their weddings, Krekor. It's normal.”

“I know it's normal. She isn't normal. She's never been normal.”

“Tcha. You're playing with words.”

“I need to take a walk,” Gregor said. “Is that rude? I don't want to be rude to you. I just need to take a walk.”

“Take your walk,” Tibor said.

Gregor had no idea if he was offended or not. He had no idea what the population of the Ararat would think about him going off and leaving Tibor alone at the table. He had only the vaguest idea what he wanted to do. Still, walking was a good idea, and he knew where he could walk to.

2

It wasn't really a walk Gregor needed to go on. Even when he'd been much younger, it would have taken him hours to walk where he wanted to go. It helped, of course, that he was not admitting that there was somewhere he did want to
go. It had been on his mind for days; he just hadn't brought it to the surface. It was odd how things worked out sometimes. When he had first left Philadelphia, he had never expected to come back, or at least never expected to come back to Cavanaugh Street. But it wasn't just the street. D.C. was a different place, a better place, as he saw it then. It was the place where he had built a reputation and a career among people whose opinions mattered in more than a local sense. Gregor was not a sentimentalist. He was not a fan of movies like
It's a Wonderful Life
that pushed the line that the great wide world was nothing but flash and ashes, and everything meaningful was to be found at home. It had been good for him to get out of what Cavanaugh Street had been when he was living there. It had been good for him to get away from family and the familiar. There was a big world out there and people made contributions in it, contributions that helped everyone everywhere. He was, he thought, making a hash of it in his own head, but the basic meaning of it all was perfectly clear to him. He liked Cavanaugh Street. He liked the people he knew there, and he liked the fact that he had known many of them for so long that they shared history in a way that would never be possible with new acquaintances. There was something to be said for having someone for whom the assassination of John F. Kennedy was the thing that happened the day after old Father Mardun Destinian had been discovered half naked with Mrs. Machanian. There was also something to be said for having someone for whom the assassination of John F. Kennedy was just the assassination of John F. Kennedy, one of those things that linked a generation, like 9/11 would link the one coming up through the public schools now.

Gregor stopped, and looked around, and realized that he was a good five blocks away from home, and not on a straight line, either. If he had been investigating his own behavior, he would have surmised that he was deliberately attempting to hide his activities from the people he lived with. Maybe that was true. He couldn't stop himself from feeling relieved that no one from Cavanaugh Street would see him hailing
this cab, or hear where he asked it to go. There was something else he missed, more than a little, about his life in Washington. There was no privacy on Cavanaugh Street. There never had been. There never would be. It went against the grain of the kind of place it was.

The first cab that deigned to notice him pulled up to the curb in front of him with a squeal of tires: not a good sign. Gregor swallowed the urge to tell the cabbie he'd changed his mind and got into the backseat, folding himself up like an oversized Murphy bed. Cabs always made him feel the full extent of his height. He slammed the door after him and double-checked to make sure he hadn't forgotten his wallet, or had it lifted while he'd been walking and paying no attention to anything around him. Then he leaned forward and told the driver, “Christ the Redeemer Armenian Cemetery.”

The driver made no comment. There was no reason for him to, even though the cemetery was on the very outskirts of the city and the chances of picking up a fare to return were very small. Gregor could think of no reason at all why Donna Moradanyan or Father Tibor—or even Bennis—shouldn't know that he was going out to the cemetery where his late wife was buried. He went there three times a year as a kind of ritual, to bring flowers and make sure the grave was being taken care of. Bennis didn't think he'd hatched from an egg an hour and a half ago, which was a good thing, because she certainly hadn't. Donna and Father Tibor would probably think it was very sweet that he still cared to go and visit this particular grave. When he'd first come out to Philadelphia, he'd visited it all the time, often as much as twice a week. He'd come out and stood at the foot of the plot and talked in his head to her, playing and replaying all the things that had hurt him so much in that last awful year, eventually asking her about the next few decisions he'd had to make, to find new work for himself, to settle down on Cavanaugh Street. At the time, he'd thought he'd had her approval—good, wonderful, go back to your roots, it will make you whole again. Now he wondered if he'd imagined all that. Would Elizabeth really have approved of his coming back
home to Cavanaugh Street? Would she have wanted to come herself? She'd been almost as desperate to get out of the place as he had been.

The city was doing odd and twisty things outside the windows of the cab. Gregor had seen a fair percentage of it in the last few years, but in a way it had never been a city he really lived in. Even when he was going to the University of Pennsylvania, the university had been nothing more than a destination and a point of departure. He went there in the mornings, spent his time in classrooms and libraries, and came back to Cavanaugh Street as soon as it started to get dark. There was a fad these days for making movies about the wonders and warmth of insular little communities. There was that silly thing Donna and Bennis had made him see, about a big fat Greek wedding, and a hundred others about small towns and the emotional superiority of ordinary ways of life. Family Man. That kind of thing. The truth of it was, insular little communities were just that, insular. That was true if they were poor and struggling, as Cavanaugh Street had been, or rich and self-congratulatory, as Cavanaugh Street was now.

“It makes you feel as if you're suffocating,” he said out loud.

The cabbie looked up into the rearview mirror and said, “Pardon me? Is there something you need?”

“No,” Gregor said. “Sorry. I was just thinking to myself.”

Actually, he'd been talking to himself, but he wasn't going to admit that, and the cabbie wasn't going to make an issue of it. They were nearly where he wanted to go anyway. He had no idea how long they'd been driving around, which meant he had no idea how long it would take him to get home when he finally wanted to go. Did he want to move away from Cavanaugh Street, was that it? Would Bennis want to move with him if he wanted to go? Bennis was Bennis. She came from a wider world. Cavanaugh Street was almost a hobby for her. She flitted in and out of it like a hummingbird flitted among the flowers.

“That was a god-awful image,” Gregor said, out loud
again, but this time the cabbie didn't appear to notice. They were almost at their destination. Gregor could see the great arched cast-iron gateway just ahead, the cross crowning the center of it, the letters fashioned to be something like Gothic without actually being that.

The cabbie turned left and pulled into the cemetery's broad entranceway. Gregor reached into his pocket for his wallet.

“I could drive you in, if you wanted,” the cabbie said. “I could wait. It's going to be hard finding a cab to take you back if I don't.”

“I know,” Gregor said, getting out into the cold January air. “I don't know how long I'm going to be. Why don't you take that and keep the change.”

The cabbie put the small wad of bills into his breast pocket without counting them. “It's good to see these old cemeteries kept up like this,” he said. “You'd be surprised how many I see that are falling apart. Families die out, maybe, or move away. Or maybe it's just that it's not a custom anymore, visiting a grave.”

“People do seem to do less of it,” Gregor said.

Then he turned away and began to walk slowly through the gates, past the small guard house with nobody in it. It was not a quiet cemetery. The stones were very close together, and some of them were so large that they oppressed the landscape, big statues of angels and eagles, big slabs of marble with the Ten Commandments carved into them. He wondered what it cost to buy a monument like that, and why anybody would do it. He could almost understand it for the death of a child. He found it hard to comprehend that a family would go to that expense for an older member, somebody they had been expecting to die forever. Maybe families felt guilty. Maybe they just felt scared.

He made his way through along the curving asphalt drive that would have taken him to every corner of the cemetery and then out again at the front if he'd followed it that far. The wind was stiff and cold, but not as cold as it had been only a few days before. The day was grayish, as if suspended
in time, neither morning nor evening, neither fully day nor approaching night. He found the lot section where he had laid Elizabeth to rest in the oddest ceremony he could remember. Father Tibor had performed it, and a dozen people from Cavanaugh Street had come, but he had known none of them at the time, not even the ones he'd grown up with. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe there was something in his mind that said that Cavanaugh Street was a grave he'd escaped from, and only returned to bury his dead, and that by staying he had buried himself as well. The idea made him impatient with himself. Had he really been unhappy all these years? Had he really gotten nothing more from the time he'd spent there than to be buried alive? He was behaving like an adolescent ass, imagining that nobody would ever understand him until he shook off the dust of his provincial home and made his way to the Great Big City.